JULES HOEPTING
Design Editor
Read the following sentence: “The decision is up to them.”
In your brain, that sentence probably has the same meaning as this sentence: “The decision is up to a group of people.”
Does that mean “them” is always in reference to a group of people? No. Read this next sentence.
“That is the student’s decision. The choice is up to them.”
The apostrophe is before the “s,” so there is only one student being discussed. That student has not been assigned a gender, so when a pronoun takes the place of the noun, “them” can be used.
But couldn’t I have replaced the noun “student” with “his/her?” Yes, I could have.
My point is — did reading “That is the student’s decision. The choice is up to them,” sound odd to you?
My prediction is it did not.
Does the following sentence sound odd to you?
“What is thy opinion?”
It probably does, because people no longer use “thou,” “thee,” “thine” and “thy” when talking directly to a person. Instead, we use the pronouns “you” and “your.”
But we also use “you” and “your” to address a group of people.
For example, “People of America, I want to be your politician.”
Huh. What do you know? We already use the same pronouns to address both singular and plural forms of people. And it doesn’t sound odd to us, because we can decipher whether the pronoun is being used as singular or plural based on context.
Language and grammar change over time. New words are introduced — think “selfie” and “googling,” which are both recognized words by the Merriam-Webster dictionary — and existing words change their meaning over time and/or by context. “Calling” someone no longer means visiting someone’s house. Signs that say “don’t drink and drive” are not telling drivers they are forbidden from having a sip of water while operating a vehicle.
Besides, gender is a social construct. How people view other people based on gender assigned at birth changes over time.
Don’t believe me? Google “sexist ‘50s ads.” Feel your eyes widen as you observe what was once deemed acceptable through the modern societal lens.
And why is gender included in pronouns in the first place? Why does it matter if someone identified as a “he” or a “she” when referring to what they thought? It doesn’t, really.
Notice how I used “they” to refer to a hypothetical singular person in the second sentence of the previous paragraph? No? Case dismissed.